In God We Trust: The Methodological Infirmity of Faith as Compared with Science

What is it about?

This is the sixth chapter of The Devil’s Advocate vs. God’s Honest Truth: A Dialectical Inquiry into the Rationality of Religion. It explores the epistemological aspects of the opposition between theism and its rivals, including atheism, agnosticism, and skepticism, particularly in terms of the reliability of the methodology common and peculiar to the prospects for justification in faith versus science. The purpose of the comparison is to bring out the defining differences between theism and its rivals in terms of how faith and science approach the matter of epistemic justification in the process of determining what constitutes compelling insight into the way the world works and our place in it as rational agents. The comparison draws on Willard Van Orman Quine’s (1978) thesis of the methodological infirmity of ethics as compared with science, consequently presenting a case for a comparable infirmity in theism as compared with atheism, the former being grounded in and bound by faith, while the latter presumably proceeds in conformity with the scientific method, among other ways of exploring reality and contemplating morality. The aim of the presentation is not to demonstrate that Quine was right about the methodological infirmity of ethics, nor to prove that theism suffers from the same infirmity, assuming that it is indeed present in ethics, but to use the comparative analysis of Quine as a springboard for illustrating some of the misgivings that naturally occur to any audience that is not already convinced of the existence of God.

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Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash

Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash